Its been a while since I looked at Reliability and Performance monitor, but saw somebody else doing the same recently. Now I am not sure if using laptop affects reliability over a normal machine, but compared to others, my Vista experience is more varied. On the whole I am very happy, I just get annoyed when like today my machine fails to come back from hibernation. So on with a quick review of the last three months
September
September shows the highest recorded reliability with 9.17 but then drops rapidly
Initially I see 3x Disruptive shutdown, 2x OS Stopped Working, 2x Outlook.exe stopped responding, 1x WinWord stopped responding, 1x TSMService.exe stopped responding, and 1x iexplore.exe stopped responding. The cliff highlighted is due to KHost.exe, Kservice.exe and 4x MSIExec.exe so I can safely blame BBC iPlayer for that.
October
October is pretty flat going from 7.12 on the 30th Sept to 7.52 on the 21st Oct. In between there are fails in PresentationDirector.exe, 3x Disruptive Shutdown, OneNote.exe, 1x DevEnv (VS 2005), OS Stopped working, BITS.exe, 2x TSMService.exe, 3x My own programs and 2x TabTip.exe (both on the 22nd)
November
November has ten Disruptive shutdowns but overall reliability gets better.
December
December sees a move to IE8 Beta, which is great but brings instability with it. IE8's 'reopen tabs if I crashed' feature is well worth putting up with any other issues it brings with it. Otherwise I get 5 disruptive shutdowns and a couple more iPlayer issues.
January so far
Well today's Disruptive shutdown, along with three IE crashes, 1x explorer.exe and an msnmgr.exe, drops me from a peak of 8.15 down to 6.83.
Conclusion
As I said before I am very happy with Vista on the whole, and I am looking forwards to Windows 7. However somewhere between Windows and my Hardware, I really ought to be seeing a lot less disruptive shutdowns. In this case I have to blame Lenovo. My hardware is less than 20 months old, being a Thinkpad X61 Tablet. The install seems a very customised Vista build with more time spent on the Lenovo pieces that the Vista install. I would personally love to flatten it and install plain Windows, no OEM components and compare how that goes.